If you are wondering “what career choice is right for me?”, there are many tools you can use to help you to discover your next career. From becoming aware of your own priorities, preferences and strengths, to organising your research of suitable careers. This article will give you some direct actions you can take right now to be confidence in your choice of career.
What Are You Looking For in a New Career?
Before we start, it is worth taking the time to establish your motivations for choosing a new career. How you want to feel when you achieve that goal? Most of the time, we seek a new career when we feel dissatisfied with our current career. Those feelings of dissatisfaction are our brain’s way of helping us to change when our career no longer fits with our values, needs, desires or lifestyle right now. We are constantly changing throughout our lives, and so it is not surprising that we find ourselves dissatisfied with our career at various stages. By choosing a new career, we are seeking to increase feelings of career satisfaction again.
How will you want to feel when you choose and achieve a new career? Do you want to feel excited about your career choice? Calm, relaxed or relieved? Instead of asking, “what career choice is right for me?” you can now ask “how will I feel when I have chosen the right career for me?”. That feeling will be your mind letting you know that you are on the right track.
Finding Out More About You
Getting clear about our own values, strengths, personality and career priorities cuts out a lot of wasted time in your career search, as you can easily disregard careers that do not fit with your needs. It also enables you to feel confident in answering “what career choice is right for me?” because you will have based your choice on your current status in these areas.
Values
Make sure that you know at least your top 5-10 values, as a mismatch between your career and your most important values will lead to greater career dissatisfaction. You can either choose your top values from a list of values (just search online), or take a values assessment. My favourite values assessment is the Personal Values Assessment (PVA). There are several other psychological assessments of values that you can take online. For a link to the PVA test online: https://www.valuescentre.com/tools-assessments/pva/. For an indepth article on the validity and reliability of three of the best values assessments see this PositivePsychology.com article: https://positivepsychology.com/values-questionnaire/?utm_content=cmp-true.
Strengths
Studies show that we tend to prefer doing activities that we are good at. Basing your new career choice on skills and strengths that you already have will also reduce the amount of time needed to learn and practice the skills required for your new roles. You may already be aware of your strengths, or have received feedback about your strengths from teachers, colleagues, friends and family. There are assessments you can take to find your own strengths if you would like a little extra clarity in this area. Two recommendations for online strengths assessments are high5test.com and https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/home.aspx. There are many other strengths tests out there, and hopefully there will be agreement in the outcomes that increases your confidence in their reliability for you.
Personality
Your personality type can also be useful to know when answering the question “what career choice is right for me?”. The Myer-Biggs personality test and the Big 5 personality traits theory are often used by individuals and workplaces to assess how you might work and deal with stressful or difficult situations. It can help you in your career choice to be aware of the kind of work environments and colleagues you may find suit you best. Some fun online assessments in this area are 16personalities.com and the Type Finder Personality Test at https://www.truity.com/test/type-finder-personality-test-new.
Priorities and Preferences
When you have a good idea about yourself, you are in a good position to consider what is most important to you in your career right now. These are the aspects of a career that have the most impact on your life and are most necessary or desired in terms of what you want out of the role. These also include whether you are suitable for the role.
Some career-related aspects are predetermined, and we have no control over their necessity to be a top consideration in our career choice (e.g. physical disability, location constraints, consideration of other responsibilities etc.). Other career-related aspects may be important to us because of our values, previous experience, or linked to those predetermined constraints. For example, it may be important to you to be able to work in shifts, or to find a role that cares for people or the planet. Everyone will have different circumstances and priorities, so this is an activity for you to focus on what is important to you alone, and what you would or would not be willing to compromise on to find what career choice is right for you.
Research Careers Based on Your Preferences
Psychologists Gati and Asher (2001) recommend choosing a new career by sequentially eliminating careers from your list of possible careers that do not meet your most important career-related aspect. If the list of careers is longer than seven, remove any careers that do not meet your second most important career-related aspect requirements, and so on, until you have a list of seven or less potential careers. You are then in a better position to research these careers more thoroughly, knowing that all of them are getting closer to being the answer to “what career choice is right for me?” because they all meet your top preferences (if they didn’t, they would have been eliminated from your list!).
If you would like support with how to choose a new career, or any of the activities mentioned in this article, please subscribe to the email list below.
Thank you 🙂
